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as
an introduction
to language
"pringles"
fails
*
you could say i'm trying
too hard
and be right
you could
fuck a horse
*
male
art
i
make
male art
*
shackleton, the explorer
died at forty-seven
in antarctica
while you read this
again
No anthems:
just waking up with a small dog calling me "fuckface"
by the bed.
If I could make this fresh
as a kiss,
I will have revealed something like a "mystic truth."
But that's just between you
and me.
I don't want much else.
I've just finished designing the website for filmmaker and poet Abigail Child. If you run a page that could link to this site, please do, since that will help it get picked up by seach engines. I'm pretty proud of the work I did on this one, it's the prettiest site I've designed yet (with much help from her images, of course).
Nice post by Geoff Huth, someone I'd never heard of before (though with my dim brain we've probably already had beers together in Buffalo or something) about this "Blake test" business and my poem "Please Think Again (Poem for Airports)". He even took the time out to do a nice screen cap:
"Please Think Again" got 4,952 hits last week, 2,495 of them on the same day (the 13th). Must have been the day Ron posted about it. Anyway, here's Geoff's blog, which covers all sorts of matters regardning visual poetics and the such -- he seems incredibly knowledgable, with other posts earlier this week on Australian visual poet Pete Spence and the late Jackson Mac Low:
Prices could fall, they could give us a break
from tedium. They could pretend to go haywire
and get us loopy again. They could react diametrically
to what you have been feeling about him lately
sitting somewhere lost in a haze of bling bling talk.
Prices could get us talking about "puffins" again
like they were part of the establishment, going on
getting about, and not merely some code word for keeping wet
days on end by the laptop, frugal snow landing
outdoors. Some of these tropes are "cute" because they tend to "convert"
the necessity to speak into a vulgar, but charming, syllabary
for quicker downloads -- i.e. you don't have to "get it" to
go on. But there's nothing much else
to do. Prices just keep chewing up
the sidewalk, like a mouthwash that gets more effective with re-use,
the "slush pile" suggesting a wealth of unanswered literature.
Ecco Press, March 2005
0-06-07629-1
96 pages
It’s a strange fact that Ashbery, in a long life of writing, has only chosen to write fiction once, A Nest of Ninnies (1976), and that is in collaboration with his friend, the great poet James Schuyler. But part of the appeal of Ashbery, especially the later writing, is his swerves into the rich field of resonant, specific associations that only a person enmeshed in the world of a novel would understand, without any of the compromises to plot – often mistaken for “reality” – that the novelist must make to remain popular. Ashbery, for whom reality might be “that shabby costume drama in which all had become embedded like La Brea tar,” gives you his side of the collaboration and you are invited to fill in the rest, which is why Ashbery is a genuinely popular poet – he takes the pleasures of games and makes of them poetic seductions, wooing the reader into puzzling through his apparent feints and non-sequiturs. Where Shall I Wander is a modestly-scaled book – it doesn’t end with a grand long poem that has become an Ashbery trademark since Rivers and Mountains, nor is it especially big like Can You Hear, Bird, nor does it even contain many poems that extend more than three pages (the title poem, at seven, is the longest). But this let’s one stop and appreciate the tightness of sentences, and how they fall snugly – never orderly, but always a step ahead of norms of “prosody,” like waves from some composition of Debussy’s – into stanzas: “Another’s narrative supplants the crawling / stock-market quotes. Like all good things / life tends to go on too long, and when we smile / in mute annoyance, pauses for a moment. / Rains bathe the rainbow, / and the shape of night is an empty cylinder, / focused at us, urging its noncompliance / closer along the way we chose to go.” (30) One is in a world that is part Joseph Cornell and part Henry James (and maybe, with the cylinder, part Close Encounters) – Ashbery creates child-like dioramas chock full of odd juxtaposition that explain the sophisticated, wounded, and much too inexperienced mind to itself. “It all involves fetishes, those poor misunderstood employees of the sexual closet,” he writes in one of the many prose poems, after lulling us with the dream-like montage that is both epic and errant, as in the opening sequences of a noir: “A chance encounter in the street, an ancient phrase offered by a delicate woman, sends him back to burrow in the rubble of his youth. A few viable wisps still protrude.” The adjective “Ashberian” – how can it ever be defined? – also includes the ability to change gears in the middle of a sentence, even a clause – “And for a number of years, our track record / was zero and polite” (56) – keeping the air of grammatical surprise on a par with the unpredictable approaches of narrative. Perhaps his secret is in providing us with the experience of terrible encounter in the comfort of our own poem, one we decide to occupy for years even after discovering the beating heart under the floorboards, or the cabal of octogenarian witches next door drugging the mousse. Readers of Ashbery will be especially pleased to discover how these often very short poems respond across decades to the work of his (in hindsight almost tentative) first book, Some Trees (1956) – instead of “dim Guadalajara” we have “the interesting people of Newfoundland,” for example – and how loyal he has remained to us, the readers, in his early promise to keep us amazed.
Take that prisoner to the center of the page,
try him, tie him, and photograph him.
Something must burn the Narcissus. Is it this
strange swimming thing he's doing with his hands,
kind of odd, dangling above the pool
of his own blood? Kierkegaard could use this as an illustration
of Hegel, and "history," as this photogaph
I'm holding will show to prove: I read the news.
The passionate will continue to argue, or
agree. They will continue to mispronounce "Moonache."
The looping reel will still throw the rape
back on the walls: from memory, the whole fucking thing.
Sampling the terrible break:
a fascist ideology to be had for breakfast,
a disco-colored box of cereal
certain to contain the pilgrim's remnants,
a code that came in a muffin
concealed in the hutch of a President's brain,
a syllable that won't float on oil,
and the largesse of neighbors returned to disdain.
Now it's time to charge, and forget about the quagmire.
For several years, we've been practicing this disposition:
using cell phones on rollerblades, for example,
or offering antique maps to visiting, obscene peasants
-- unlucky bastards, to have come across you!
which is all absorbed in discussion, late nights around
the Godard DVDs, the box set of a late Seventies No Wave band
recorded on a shoe-string, or the elastic of someone's neck.
It's positively electric: the spurious evolved into Classics
which means: there's no test on Monday, only this
revolving around political enigmas, letting them float on by:
"The Leaves Of The Tree Are Falling
Underneath The Sky." I'd, stupidly, want a little more definition,
something to hope, nightly, by. But that all changes with age.
You'll have an age where the clothes simply fall
off, revealing a late Bronzino, or some able fake. Or them, simply.
Whoever it was that died and made you God
should be sued.
Thoughts tend to evaporate
in aggressive company.
There is nothing holy
in the progression of mutes
sidling down the runny highway,
even the fun ones carrying flags
kind of dull. So what,
can't that be a kind of anthem,
when to talk next a kind of rune
perplexing the Scrabble wiz
like it was forever Tuesday afternoon,
fond space of thoughts in the room?
No. Shut up. That's
ok. I'm just a little bit confused.
These speeches are just so demanding.
But I confess, I'm a novice.
And they, terribly, keep on walking.
It's funny to think
all the appetites were wrong.
When the players are questioned
they jump,
but eventually arrive
sweating in their field glasses,
seeing it all through a vaseline sheen
which is unpleasant,
but not like a core of uncooked dough.
One has to remember,
when one chooses. Same time
one thinks it's the beginning
of a semblance of good humor
that could be worn
in times of emergency,
like when brand new helicopters fail
to land on a matchstick
hidden in the rubbish of a football field
long after the scare tactic
has ended.
The scare was like a tonic, some
admixture of chemical pollutants
that influenced the vote.
The telegram was frank:
Feel like you're sitting
on the outside of a gang
of sailors
slapping themselves silly
in the tropical heat,
glowing with the same rude health
of uncounted lives, numberless vistas
trampled in their uncouth care.
Famished,
there is nothing left to do
but surrender, and gawk at the way
the gales leave all the students
dead in piles.
Last time you arrived
in hell, there were homes left to be rented
and spoils in each of the piles.
[Someone asked me on ubuweb why I even bother writing about Ron's blog -- good question! I've pasted my reply below, my final thoughts on the matter.]
It really doesn't bother me. I figure I've been out of the loop for a while, and Ron's just pushing my buttons so that I'll flame him. I'm assuming he's very aware of his own tactics, and like I said, the publicity is good for the work though I would have preferred it after a proper launch, when I've finished the poems (it's part of a sequence of 24 short works). I really don't know why anyone reads his blog anyway, I haven't gone near it in months.
I do get a little angry when someone professes to have applied a "test" to a work of art, and not prove in any way that the test has actually been done -- i.e. a quote from the poem, some sense of how the test was applied, etc. He couldn't have applied it unless he's actually recreated the text from the Flash piece. But I don't think he read the thing at all -- even one of the commenters on his blog picked up on one of my favorite lines from the poem, "Mandy Moore Sparkles" -- which makes him a liar when it comes to making any sort of claims of knowledge about the work, or "Flash Poems" in general.
I.e. why claim to have done something if you haven't? Why the "Blake test" and not a mere opinion? It's false authority.
But he's done this with works he likes, too -- I feel terrible for Carla Harryman! That's the puzzle: why bring everyone down because of your own laziness, in reading, understanding, terminology? It makes poetry and art seem quite cheap. Sometimes I want to pull a John Stewert (i.e. on Crossfire) and just say stop -- partisanship for sport is boring.
So there I am, just surfing along, when I come upon this crapola -- this guy's a writer? "E e e e e e e e e e e e"??? Noam, my chimpanzee, could do this while rolling over and cutting the cheese.
(Those etymologist among us would notice that the name McCaffery is probably Irish -- he would probably read this "A a a a a a a a a a a a." The literary among us would suspect a Joycean pun in there somewhere -- Aristophanes? Either way, it's hooey!)
And then there's this sh*t -- all monosyllables! There isn't an allusion to Dante or Lorine Niedecker in the whole run -- what happened to the American tradition. And she's a woman to boot! (Sorry that I haven't mentioned any women yet in this post, I guess I'm just a bit imperfect, like everybody.) These lines would never work in a book -- that's why she has to "dress them up" so to speak -- with lights and t-shirts! Fat chance!
Blake would vomit. Then call his lawyer.
This guy's clearly been looking at Rob Grenier -- where else would he get this idea? (And what did Grenier write about singing from the diaphragm? You can't even hum this.) You call this a quatrain? I call it FRAUD!
http://www.zwirnerandwirth.com/
I thought I had put all this behind me -- and then I find this tripe!
Numbers again -- these poets are getting so a-political! What a travesty of the Language tradition. Why, why, if I were editing an anthology now... this guy would be banned to the Poetics section! I don't care if he gave me a ride to a Stephen Rodefer reading in Berkeley 1974 once, when my wife was sleeping and the baby and Kathleen were sleeping -- all saliva under the bridge! Basta!
There's a grand canyon of difference between the tight quatrains of Kit Robinson and this turgid mess, which looks like it was written by a computer for a computer. (And "unbound pages"??? Didn't Rob Grenier do this in Sentences? What happened to honor among thieves?) I think I may have to give up poetry after all.
Do you believe this garbage? It “says nothing to me about my life” (the “Morrissey Test”) –- and it doesn't even rhyme! I would never buy this in a book:
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/
This one doesn't rhyme or scan -- what a load of horse poopy! What did Rob Grenier write about singing from the diaphragm? We should send this guy back to Argentina! Send all of them back!
This one doesn’t even appear to be in American. It’s just numbers! And what is a “Carlo” anyway??? And why "Dill"? Modernism hasn’t been any good in twenty years. Something there is that doesn’t wub-a-dub:
What is this, some kind of f*cking joke? I don't even think he wrote this! Olson would sue! Rachel Blau DuPlessis would sue! Google would sue! (I had to use my back button to get out of this one.)
Maybe this whole poetry thing isn't for me after all. I think I'll stick to pointing video cameras at skyscrapers and playing my iPod too loud in church. It’s all so confusing, so... demanding -- if only Robert Lowell hadn’t ruined it all by putting his lines in a book!
Would this mad genius
have drawn this?
I think the real Blake test is the following: "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's." Now that's a challenge. Carla Harryman is much closer to passing this Blake test than Ron Silliman's more, uh, trivial pursuit.
[Ron Silliman didn't want to put this on his blog but rather leave it in the comments section, so I'm putting it here. Response to his "Brian Kim Stefans, failed Blake Test" post.]
Dear Ron,
I'll keep this brief just to clear up some inaccuracies. Following is the email I sent to the ubulist, the only place you could have heard about the "Poem for Airports":
***
I worked on a new one today:
http://www.arras.net/a_book_of_poems/please_think_again/index.html
There's a "close" button on the bottom left of the screen.
***
I had been sending my works-in-progress to the ubulist for a few weeks now, with all sorts of disclaimers about how the text wasn't done, the programming wasn't finished, etc., so "I worked on a new one today" should have tipped you off that I wasn't done with the piece.
Also, you don't have to "control-alt" out of it because I included a close button -- see, I'm not incompetent!
There is no such thing as a Flash Poem just as there is no such thing as a Paper Poem. Also, you don't even mention Blake in your blog post, so what is the "Blake Test" and how did I fail it? Who said I was taking a test at all? (This seems to me an example of the unnecessarily bombastic framing that you use often in your posts to make casual observations seem much more important – I like what you say much better when you don’t do this.)
Neither what Blake nor what I do in this poem could count as “graphic design” – I’m entirely too unpractical, and he’s entirely too weird (though he did earn a good penny for Night Thoughts).
Lastly, comparing my writing to Kenny's uncreative writing practice doesn't make any sense at all. Kenny is talking about writing practices that don't involve anything "creative" textually on the part of the "writer" -- it is more about transferring already written texts, or ambient texts, into a paper medium, or maybe, as in the case of my “Howl, One Letter At A Time,” taking it from a paper (or oral) medium and presenting it electronically, not changing a word.
The poem that I set, “Please Think Again,” was written quite conventionally, on a typewriter, coming right out of my leg. It’s not a bad read actually -- it's been up at my blog for weeks: www.arras.net/fscII. Before classing my poem as “uncreative”, you should at least explain what you mean (or what Kenny means) by uncreative writing and then compare. (If you want to find some of my “theory” about what I might be doing in my poem, look at my review of Tan Lin’s BlipSoak01 at Boston Review.)
As a parting note, I think when someone calls a piece “A Poem For Airports,” they are asking for a comparison to Brian Eno (“Music for Airports”), not William Blake. Ironically, it was Carla Harryman’s husband, Barrett Watten, who introduced me to the ambient light show tunnel that connects the old and new airports in Detroit (they have them everywhere now) that this poem reminded me of.
I’m not sure how “Open Box” – whose only graphic appears to be a box taken right out of the standard Windows Wingdings font, and whose only motion is the “file transferring” graphic that everyone sees in Windows – passes the “Blake test.” He drew some pretty interesting pictures. This poem seems to me rather simplistic: a Flash graphic over-elaborating a very uninteresting metaphor -- i.e. we are reading these pages “as if” they were taken from an open box. So here’s the open box. Uh huh.
Without making too many claims for my poem, isn’t a poem that could conceivably be projected on a wall in a civic space more “genre busting” then a set of quatrains that are made to look like they are on sheets of paper flying out of a box? How many pieces of civic sculpture do you know that involve only words and light?
Anyway, I hope I’ve managed to bridge the “Grand Canyon of difference” – ouch! -- between my and Carla Harryman’s writing practice. My apologies if I don’t care as much about words as the Old Guard. It’s amusing to be thrown up against an orthodoxy and being found wanting – should I become a Catholic now? Has Robert Grenier been canonized yet? Can’t I be a “cataloger’s nightmare” too?
Thanks as always for the free publicity and the provocation, but I would have liked it more after I had completed the poem, and if you were more accurate in your description of it.
Cheers,
Brian
PS: Oops, I realize there was a mention of a "Blake test," though why he comes up in a question of "platform-independence" is beyond me.
But if "Open Box" passes the "Blake test," does that mean we can take the graphic of the open box and present it by itself as an interesting work of art, much as we can take the words out of Blake and still have the most innovative 18th English visual artist? Just shows how little appreciation of (what one might call) visual culture some Language poets seem to have.
(Blake, for example, couldn't pass the "Sir Joshua Reynolds" test for visual language, or the "Alexander Pope" test for correct couplets -- the orthodoxies of his time, both rich artists -- but we still like him!)
In any case, my poem is on my blog, if you want to read it. But the "Blake test" doesn't exist. It seems weighty to allude to Blake and all, but after Finlay, McCaffery, Drucker, Duchamp, the Brazilians, Nauman, etc., it hardly matters.
Cheers,
Brian
